You know, we are living in really fascinating times. I feel
somewhat privileged to be living in an era when I can observe as a
major world power as it loses its ideology. I can see it going
from embracing one point of view to hating it and embracing the
reverse point of view. This was an ideology that it had tried to
export to the whole world, now it cannot even export it to its own
people. Now you probably think I am talking about the fall of
Communism in the Soviet Union. It is easy to see that they have
given up an ideology they held dear and have turned to hate it.
But I am not talking about Communism. The country I am talking
about is the good old United States. The ideology is tobacco. A
case could be made that tobacco held the United States more firmly
than Communism held the Soviets. Not long ago we were a country of
smokers.

I admit now that I do not have the full facts. I do not understand
the hold that tobacco had on this country. I can tell you that if
you look at 1940s film they really are pushing the ideology of
tobacco. I just watched THIRTY SECONDS OVER TOKYO with Spencer
Tracy recreating the Doolittle Raid. The training the airmen seem
to have been doing was all how to smoke. They are smoking in one
scene after another. Van Johnson's plane goes down and he is
collected by ... by whom? Are they Chinese or Japanese? Are they
good guys or bad guys? Their leader gives Van Johnson a cigarette.
Okay, they must be good guys. They give people cigarettes. A few
years later these 1940s war movies would come under close scrutiny
for scenes like one man in a trench sharing his cigarettes with
another and saying "share and share alike." That would be called a
dangerous pro-Communist sentiment. The pro-tobacco part was no
problem at all. But it was really the ideology of tobacco that
these films were pushing. And I have not even bothered to watch
BRIGHT LEAF, the stirring story of how a real he-man, played by
Gary Cooper, builds a tobacco empire. You should watch some of
these Thirties films and look at how hard they work at selling the
audience on smoking.

I suppose I can tell you part of the reason I dislike tobacco. I
am going back many years. There was something that happened my
first year or two at Bell Laboratories that has stuck with me. I
was in an office with two other people. One of them worked with a
fourth person who smoked almost constantly and would come to our
office. He insisted on smoking in our office, in fact. I am not a
rude person, but I did ask him not to smoke where I had to work.
Giving me the uni-digital sign of contempt, he explained to me that
he had a right to smoke wherever he wanted. I was infringing on
his right to smoke by asking him not to smoke around me. That
really was the mind-set of those days. The tobacco industry had
very successfully convinced smokers that someone telling them not
to smoke was an violation of their rights. Smokers were really
militant. My belligerent smoker told me that that nobody would
ever convince him to stop smoking. Otherwise he was a reasonable
guy, but he really bought the line of militancy that he had gotten
from big tobacco and passed on to me. I went to my supervisor to
complain. My supervisor did not smoke, but I worked for him so he
had some sway over me. The other guy did not. My supervisor said
that I was creating a confrontational atmosphere by complaining
about cigarette smoke. Well, he called it an "us-versus-them"
environment since I suspect he was uncomfortable with five-syllable
words. As an aside several years later I ran into most of my
militant smoker and he told me proudly that he had now given up
smoking. He had completely quit. I say it was "most of him"
because there were large parts of his lung that were no longer a
part of him, they had been surgically removed.

It was very recently that the forces of society were all on the
side of the smoker and the higly-subsidized tobacco industry. Now
perhaps the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction as I
will discuss next week. [-mrl]

Capsule: What starts as a new version of THE
HAUNTING mixes in aspects of THE UNINVITED and
THE LEGEND OF HELL HOUSE. Eventually director
Jan de Bont gives in to the temptation to
excess and his film turns into POLTERGEIST.
Still enough is worth seeing here, particularly
for the beautiful production design by Eugenio
Zanetti. Jan de Bont was the wrong person to
direct, but the film still succeeds in raising
gooseflesh thanks in large part to the
atmosphere created by Zanetti. Rating: 7 (0 to
10), low +2 (-4 to +4)

For me there are three ghost stories on film that I would put in my
first tier-these are the best. Those are THE UNINVITED, THE
INNOCENTS, and THE HAUNTING (1963). The second tier would include
THE LEGEND OF HELL HOUSE, THE CHANGELING, and THE LADY IN WHITE.
There would probably be a few others. The third tier would
probably include POLTERGEIST, effective but a little soul-less. In
interviews about the new THE HAUNTING from The Dreamworks, this
second film based on the novel THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE by
Shirley Jackson, director Jan de Bont (SPEED, TWISTER) said that he
was not really approaching this as a horror film. What he wanted
was to make was a different sort of action film. Audiences are
tired of traditional crime action films, but not many have been
done as horror. Given that that is the case, it is remarkable that
the new THE HAUNTING is as good as it is at raising gooseflesh.
For now I would put it in the second tier. I may or may not feel
that positive on the film in five years. Time and again de Bont
does wrong what director Robert Wise did so very right in the 1963
version. Part of what made the original film effective is that the
main character was weak. We could empathize with her rather than
admire her and we saw the film from inside her head, even to the
point of hearing her thoughts. The horror in the 1963 version is
almost all heard rather than seen. There is just a hint that is
visual that any of this is really happening. Wise had to use very
three-dimensional characters to make the people and the threat to
them seem real. Today's younger action audience might not have
responded to that, so instead de Bont gives us some strong
characters and the scariest haunted house money can buy. There are
more special effects in the trailer to the new film than Wise put
into the entirety of his version.

Eleanor Lance (played by Lili Taylor) gets an invitation to be part
of a sleep study by Dr. Jeffrey Marrow (Liam Neeson). The study
will have her staying in a huge old mansion dating back to 1837.
The house was built by a textile magnate and was the scene of much
unhappiness. Eleanor's fellow test subjects include the seductive
Theodora (Catherine Zeta-Jones) and the irreverent Luke Sannerson
(Owen Wilson). What none of the subjects knows is that the study
is not about sleep but about fear. Marrow is intentionally putting
them into a frightening house to observe their reaction. As Marrow
says "you don't tell the rats the rats will be in a maze." But the
house may be scarier than he realizes. Even Marrow does not know
the full history of evil in this house or of the spirits of the
original master among others who still make the house their home.
While starting with the plot from the book and the original film,
this plot goes off in some new directions. Jerry Goldsmith makes
his own comment on the profusion of haunting phenomena we see in
this film by starting his end-credit music with a carnival theme.

There are far too many touches in this film that just seem weak
after having seen the Robert Wise version (two nights earlier, in
fact). In the original the groundskeeper and housekeeper seem to
have been taken over by the spirit of the house and themselves seem
to be a bit haunted. In this version they just come off as mean.
Bruce Dern plays the groundskeeper as just his usual nasty,
bullying character. It is not as effective as weaker-than-the-
house characters in the original. But de Bont has a hard time
doing weak characters. This version makes much more use of the
early residents of Hill House, particularly the industrialist who
built it and who here looks a lot like the early makeup designs for
THE PLANET OF THE APES. De Bont replaces the mysterious seductive
evil of the house with too great an abundance of strange phenomena.
If Hill House is getting this treatment from the spirits, are not
there a lot of places in which greater evils occurred. Why do we
not see this degree of haunting more places?

The production design is credited to Eugenio Zanetti. If that name
does not sound familiar consider that he performed the same
function on such beautiful films as FLATLINERS, RESTORATION, and
WHAT DREAMS MAY COME. Zanetti won the Academy Award for set design
for RESTORATION and was nominated (and deserved to win) for WHAT
DREAMS MAY COME. The Hill House he designed would be a dominating
spirit even if there were no haunting. I hope Jan de Bont realizes
how very much he owes to Zanetti for making this film as good as it
is.

This version of THE HAUNTING would be a better film by another
name. On its own it is actually quite a good ghost story about
what is the most incredibly haunted house the screen has yet seen.
By inviting comparison to one of the three best ghost stories on
film, this action-oriented version comes up a poor second. But if
we had to have a graphic version of Jackson's novel, this is far
better than any we could have expected. I give it a 7 on the 0 to
10 scale and a low +2 on the -4 to +4 scale. [-mrl]